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Authors: Fflur Dafydd

White Trail (9 page)

BOOK: White Trail
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‘She's here,' Culhwch said, smiling to himself. Arthur and Cilydd looked at each other. ‘Trust me. She knows we're coming. We'll find a way in, she'll make sure of it.'

As though in a trance, they followed the boy as he trailed the flowers, trampling each one underfoot as he went to mark their path. The white, trembling spirals sent them left, then right, then left again, the three of them walking in frantic paces, hurtling through brambles, eyes to the ground, until they felt dizzy. Hours passed. The sun slowly abandoned them. A strange feeling crept over Cilydd. Some weakness, right at the very core of him. He realised he had not eaten or slept for hours. But he wanted his body to keep going. Where were his reserves of energy? Surely his body could keep him awake for a few more hours. When Goleuddydd disappeared he had stayed awake for a week or more, the midnight oil of despair spitting and hissing inside him. He needed strength now, resolve. To show his son he could be strong.

But his legs buckled. He found himself on his knees, staring up. Arthur's eyes seemed to be sloping too, sliding down his face.

‘I don't feel too well,' Cilydd said, leaning against a tree to catch his breath.

The hard earth had never felt so comforting, so secure, like a good orthopaedic bed. He slumped at the foot of a tree. The forest seemed to be growing thicker, denser with every passing moment; it seemed additional leaves were flocking to the trees. He squinted up at them. It took him a few moments to see that they were not in fact leaves at all; they were birds. Lithe little leaf-shaped birds, flocking to the branches, all utterly silent.

‘Where are they all coming from?' he asked Arthur, in a voice he no longer recognised as his own; dense and mucous-filled.

‘I'm not… I'm not... sure,' Arthur's sentence fell into the earth along with its owner.

‘Get up!' he was vaguely aware of his son saying. ‘Don't give in to it! Get up! 'The voice seemed to be getting further and further away; a voice carried off with the waves of dusk, a little boy lost at sea.

‘Come back,' his son seemed to be saying. ‘Come back.'

Cilydd's last thought was how much the birds looked like the ones Culhwch had described to him, the ones his mother kept in the aviary at the foot of the garden. When they turned their heads slowly their eyes glistened with copper and their feathers seemed to take on an emerald tinge. The twittering was unbearable: a rush of noise, at turns beautiful and terrible. It started with the opening of a single beak, right above him, and somehow escalated, with another bird, and then another, adding their imperfect melody. When Cilydd looked up it seemed the air was dense with feathers and song and by the time he looked down it seemed the earth had fallen away beneath him and he could do nothing but fall, and give in to its dark embrace.

Ysbaddaden Bencawr

Cilydd was first aware of a single, cool breath on his face. His arms felt light by his side, and his eyelids seemed to blossom gently as they opened. He felt remarkable. Better than he'd felt in years.

‘Cilydd,' the breath came again. ‘Take your time. Savour the waking up. It's never felt so good, believe you me.'

The room was dimly lit and windowless. Even though his body seemed entirely at peace his mind was unclear, full of noise, full of chatter.

‘The birds,' he recalled suddenly.

The figure laughed; a rasping, hollow sound.

‘Ah yes, magnificent aren't they? Very rare you understand, and notoriously difficult to breed. But once you've got a good flock of them, they really are the most wonderful creatures. So cheap to keep, too. They don't need any food. What keeps them going is pure, clean air. They just eat it up. They've never known hunger. You feed them anything other than air and they die. Your son, Culhwch, killed off a whole batch of them once. Not that I'll hold that against him now – he was just a boy back then. He's had enough to contend with over the years, hasn't he? But let's not talk about him. Let's talk about you. What do you remember, Cilydd, after being in the forest?'

Cilydd's mind was entirely blank. He had no recollection of anything beyond the wild chatter, the crazed weaving of branches above him.

‘Nothing, am I right?' came the voice again. ‘You remember nothing because you were sleeping –soundly – the kind of sleep most of us can only dream of. Can't imagine you've had much quality sleep in recent years, Cilydd, what with all the drama you've had. Missing wife, missing son – and then all that nasty business with Doged. That's got to be a few years of tossing and turning. That's why I thought I'd give you a break. A good old sleep, courtesy of Rhiannon's Birds. Quite rare, you know, as I said. You can't get them in this country now, of course, seems they all flocked way from here in search of warmer climates – don't blame them personally – but it's here that they belong, so I took it upon myself to start bringing them back. It's amazing how well preserved they are. And how powerful. In ancient times it was thought that they could wake the dead – not that I've witnessed it myself, of course. But they can still lull the living to sleep. Like nobody's business. Once that chattering starts, even the lightest sleepers are off – just like that. Out like a light, as they say.'

The figure scraped a chair across the floor and sat down opposite him. Cilydd's vision was still fuzzy. All he could make out were silvery little peaks of stubble on the man's chin.

‘Finding them was rather a piece of good luck. I mean, I was doing quite well without them, getting plenty of business – but having them at my disposal, well, it really gave the business the edge I was looking for. It made every case so much more
interesting
. They're very faithful creatures you see. Not like that wild boar of mine – he'll hunt anyone down, even his own leader, if things get bad. No, these creatures aren't primitive, far from it. They're dignified; refined even. They'll do anything to please their leader, anything. So anything I wanted – I got. No matter how difficult, they helped me obtain it. Look at your wife's case, for example. Never would have managed that one in previous years. But once I had the birds, anything was possible.'

His wife
. The words seemed alien to him for a second – wholly separate, floating meaninglessly in the air. Then he felt it. The grief. Dark and sepul-chral like a pigsty, right at the core of him.

‘You... you abducted my wife?' Cilydd again tried to move out of his chair but something was keeping him there, he couldn't understand what. There were no ropes tying him down. No shackles around his feet. It seemed that he himself was the barrier. The figure laughed. The face fell forward into a ray of light. The man was middle-aged and good-looking, wearing a dark suit that you could tell was expensive, from the way it glided over him, creaseless at every turn.

‘Abduction, honestly,' said the man. ‘We don't use that vulgar term in here. We don't abduct. We assist. Not that we were able to offer much assistance in her case. It was irresponsible of me to take on a pregnant woman, I can see that now. Not only a pregnant woman but one who was so, how shall we say...
spirited
. I mean, you only had to take one look at her and you knew there would be all sorts of problems. There was no certainty that she'd play ball. But then, everyone thought it was plausible. A new string to our bow, they said – a child. Having a child at our disposal – if you pardon the term – well, it did actually seem somewhat of an... an opportunity.'

Child
. Whose child? His history seemed to fragment in his mind. Did he have a son? Then he saw a face. A young man's face. And his mind replayed, with perfect clarity, a door opening to reveal a boy standing in front of him.

‘He was my boy,' Cilydd said, remembering the shock of that moment. The indignation rose in his throat, thickening his voice. ‘That's right. He was always my boy. Never anyone else's. He was mine and hers. You had no right to take him.'

‘It's not our job to make decisions about the rights and wrongs of any particular case, you understand. We're not here to judge. We must go with what the client wants. That's what we were doing, every step of the way. The contract Goleuddydd signed stipulated quite clearly that she wanted to disappear. That the boy would be ours, to do with as we wished. That's what she wanted. At least... at first.'

‘At first?'

‘Well, yes. Come on, Cilydd. You know what she was like. She was fine until she got here. We had everything set up – two doctors at the ready to deliver the baby, a nice comfortable room – we even had a birthing ball. She was rolling around on that thing for days. That's when, I think, the whole reality of the situation dawned on her. Too much time to think, you see Cilydd – it will happen when a woman's overdue. And that's when it all went wrong. That's when we had to rethink the whole thing. And that's when we made our mistakes. And for those we're sorry. We hope they can be put right.'

Cilydd was listening but the words seemed indistinct, floating above him, just like the birds he'd seen a few hours – or was it days – ago. The words would not fly together. Nothing made sense to him.

‘Beautiful woman, that wife of yours,' the man continued. ‘That red hair, that
chutzpah
of hers. You will recall how she charmed people – that flick of hair, those almond eyes. I should have seen the chaos she would bring, but I couldn't see past
her
. If I'd had my wits about me that day I would have stuck to my guns and I would have told her – it's strictly a one-person business, disappearing. No point bringing a second person into it – no matter how little, how vulnerable they are.'

Vulnerable
. The all-too-familiar word came at Cilydd again, slicing his insides. He saw the headlines, the news bulletins. His whole history boomed, as if announced on a supermarket loudspeaker.
The
supermarket
, he thought. Oh God, the supermarket.

‘You're not saying that she... she knew what she was doing that day? She knew you'd come for her?

She wouldn't have done that. She couldn't have.'

‘The supermarket was her choice, not ours. The option of choosing how you disappear is still quite new in this operation, you see. But we realised after a few of those boating accidents and nightclub mysteries that we were going to have to keep things varied. I mean, we can't have people making connections. Like your cousin Arthur, for example. People like that are going to burrow away at something until they get to the bottom of it – that's why we have to fox them. People have two choices. They can either select what we term as a
rational disappearance package 
– that is, make their feelings of depression known for a few days to friends and family, do a few things that are out of character so that people start to suspect something isn't right, and get that terrible feeling of foreboding that something is about to happen – and then go out in a boat or for a long walk on a cliff and seem to fall off the face of the earth – or they can choose an
irrational disappearance package
, like your wife did and – bam! – they're gone, in one moment, during an ordinary routine day, leaving everybody mystified. And I have to say, Cilydd, Goleuddydd really wanted to play with you. It was a tricky one for us too, what with the security cameras and the like – but we do like a challenge. That's where the birds came in handy. We hadn't used them much before-hand so it was a real risk for us – but, once they were in the supermarket, it worked like a dream. The shoppers dropped like dominoes, aisle by aisle. Goleuddydd wanted to take your glasses. I made her give them back. ‘But it's such a tiny detail!' she said. ‘Listen here,' I said, ‘it's the tiny details that will give the game away. Tiny details build on each other, become huge, colossal, magnificent features. Before long they've got the whole picture. 'The only thing I was worried about was the birds – if we'd manage to get them all back into the aviary. But we did, remarkably. Like I told you, they're faithful creatures, they didn't want me to leave without them. They hadn't left a single trace – so we thought – until we saw all the business about the flour aisle on the news.'

Cilydd's mind was racing now. He saw himself wandering about the supermarket, his glasses slightly askew, as she had left them, on his nose.

‘She wanted to get away from me,' he said. ‘She must have really hated me.'

‘Well, it seemed that way, at first, yes. My own diagnosis would be simply a temporary suppression of love caused by hormonal changes. But it may help you to know that once we got her here, once we got her settled in, things started to change. She began –we think – she began pining for you. She changed her mind about the whole operation and wanted out. She wanted to go back. She wanted you to have the baby.'

Of course Goleuddydd would change her mind, Cilydd thought. He knew her better than anyone. Every single thing she did was a whim.

‘Then why didn't she come back to me? Why didn't you let her go?'

The man laughed again.

‘The contract is very clear. Once you chose to come here, that's it. You can't
reappear
. It would bring the whole operation crashing down around us. You commit to a family here, Cilydd. A family which chooses to live life quietly, away from everything. Which, for some reason or another, does not want to be with their real families, with their so-called loved ones. And why not? We've got everything they need right here. Enough money to pay for everything that's needed, to keep everyone comfortable.'

‘So that's how you manage it, then, is it?' Cilydd said bitterly. ‘You take money off vulnerable people to fund this place.'

‘Come on now, Cilydd. I mean, you're a loss adjustor. You must have seen plenty of people struggling. It's not nice, is it? Here we make sure they're never going to have to struggle again. We do ask for a large sum of money – yes. And most of them find it, even the ones that are worst off. Because it doesn't matter where the money comes from. Once someone has disappeared they're absolved of all their sins and nothing really matters, does it? It's not like they have to pay any of it back to anyone. So people take out loans, get money off their friends. If they really want to come here – let's just say, they find a way. Anyway, I think I've talked enough for now. I think we should go for a little walk, to familiarise you with the place.'

BOOK: White Trail
13.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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